This book by award-winning scholar Dr. Michael Newton is a guide to the daily lives of the people of the Scottish Highlands, their vibrant culture, and their storied history during the era of the clan system. It is written for a general readership and is a must-have for all those who want a deeper understanding of Scottish Highland heritage.

Given by Eugene Edge III.

“A brisk and accessible guide to a thousand years of reiving and rivalry in the Highlands.” —The Scotsman The story of the Highland clans of Scotland is famous, the names celebrated, and the deeds heroic. Having clung to ancient traditions of family, loyalty, and valor for centuries, the clans met the beginning of their end at the fateful Battle of Culloden in 1746. Alistair Moffat traces the history of the clans from their Celtic origins to the coming of the Romans; from Somerled the Viking to Robert the Bruce; from the great battles of Bannockburn and Flodden to Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite Risings; and from the Clearances to the present day. Moffat is an adept guide to the world of the clans, a world dominated by lineage, land, and community. These are stories of great leaders and famous battles, and of an extraordinary people, shaped by the unique traditions and landscape of the Scottish Highlands. It’s a story too about the pain of leaving, with the great emigrations to the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that began after Culloden. Complete with a clan map and an alphabetical list of the clans of the Scottish Highlands, this is a must for anyone interested in the history of Scotland.

The Myth of the Jacobite Clans was first published in 1995: a revolutionary book, it argued that British history had long sought to caricature Jacobitism rather than to understand it, and that the Jacobite Risings drew on extensive Lowland support and had a national quality within Scotland. The Times Higher Education Supplement hailed its author's 'formidable talents' and the book and its ideas fuelled discussions in The Economist and Scotland on Sunday, on Radio Scotland and elsewhere. The argument of the book has been widely accepted, although it is still ignored by media and heritage representations which seek to depoliticise the Rising of 1745.Now entirely rewritten with extensive new primary research, this new expanded second edition addresses the questions of the first in more detail, examining the systematic misrepresentation of Jacobitism, the impressive size of the Jacobite armies, their training and organization and the Jacobite goal of dissolving the Union, and bringing to life the ordinary Scots who formed the core of Jacobite support in the ill-fated Rising of 1745. Now, more than ever, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans sounds the call for an end to the dismissive sneers and pointless romanticisation which have dogged the history of the subject in Scotland for 200 years.

This book examines the ordinary, routine, daily behaviour, experiences and beliefs of people in Scotland from the earliest times to 1600. Its purpose is to discover the character of everyday life in Scotland over time and to do so, where possible, within a comparative context. Its focus is on the mundane, but at the same time it takes heed of the people's experience of wars, famine, environmental disaster and other major causes of disturbance, and assesses the effects of longer-term processes of change in religion, politics, and economic and social affairs. In showing how the extraordinary impinged on the everyday, the book draws on every possible kind of evidence including a diverse range of documentary sources, artefactual, environmental and archaeological material, and the published work of many disciplines.The authors explore the lives of all the people of Scotland and provide unique insights into how the experience of daily life varied across time according to rank, class, gender, age, religion

'A superb book ... Anybody interested in Scottish history needs to read it' Andrew Marr, Sunday Times Eighteenth-century Scotland is famed for generating many of the enlightened ideas which helped to shape the modern world. But there was in the same period another side to the history of the nation. Many of Scotland's people were subjected to coercive and sometimes violent change, as traditional ways of life were overturned by the 'rational' exploitation of land use. The Scottish Clearances is a superb and highly original account of this sometimes terrible process, which changed the Lowland countryside forever, as it also did, more infamously, the old society of the Highlands. Based on a vast array of original sources, this pioneering book is the first to chart this tumultuous saga in one volume, with due attention to evictions and loss of land in both north and south of the Highland line. In the process, old myths are exploded and familiar assumptions undermined. With many fascinating details and the sense of an epic human story, The Scottish Clearances is an evocative memorial to all whose lives were irreparably changed in the interests of economic efficiency. This is a story of forced clearance, of the destruction of entire communities and of large-scale emigration. Some winners were able to adapt and exploit the new opportunities, but there were also others who lost everything. The clearances created the landscape of Scotland today, but it came at a huge price.